Some sit in darkness and gloom, says Psalm 107, and I was of them but I didn't know it more or less than a tree knows why he shakes his green-hung arms in an evening breeze. I'd seen and heard them die, an old friend and a new friend, just outside that city whose huddled steel doors had been so many times pierced by bullets that they resembled Go gameboards overwhelmed by the round black empty stones of Master Negativity. Just outside that city whose sandbagged and boarded-up windows were ringed around their frames with jagged silver ice, outside that city of scorched chair-skeletons and fresh-nailed coffins ran a river where my friends died. I think I met their murderers afterward, although in war nothing is clear. Or maybe they were Samaritans, those quiet ones with machine-guns who helped me pull my friends from the car and later tried to use their credit cards. I did what I could for the dead, which was nothing, and then I strove to guide myself back to the light.
